Jack Antonoff discusses

"I didn't plan to start a new
project. Furthermore, looking back on it, it was an
extremely un-ideal time to make a record, as I was on a
world tour with fun. Yet I felt extremely compelled to do
it. Many times when I should have been asleep, or resting,
or eating, I would go to the studio. In Stockholm, Malaysia,
in my room recording all day in Australia, literally all
over the place. When I'd have two weeks off, I’d head into
the studio in New York or L.A. and sift through everything I
had done overseas and figure out what was interesting and
what was garbage.

Then one day I realized I had an
entire album and that I had made it all over the world. My
experience making albums before this was that you lock
yourself in the studio for two weeks, make the album, and
it's a documentation of the art in that moment. This could
not have been more the opposite. I had, in the most literal
sense, a wide perspective. I would work on something in
South Korea, then I'd come home and be like, "this sounds
like someone recorded it in South Korea at 4 a.m. and
they're jet-lagged. But this one vocal part is really cool.
Let's build on that.”

It took me a second to find
the rhythm of the album. I became fascinated with that time
in culture when John Hughes was making his classic movies.
The music was so incredible — all these epic, unapologetic
pop songs with incredible forward thinking production. I
wanted to hearken back to a time when the hippest shit was
also the biggest shit. It made me mourn the happy teen years
I never had. I grew up in New Jersey and went to public high
school and was tortured for being gay, and I’m not gay.
But that’s how things were then. I felt really
disconnected in that formative time. I think we all freeze
at a moment in high school in some way. Hopefully you freeze
in a moment were you feel like a piece of trash who needs to
prove something and be better, not in a moment where
everyone thinks you're a blast. It's where the name
Bleachers comes from. It conjures feelings of that time for
me in a non literal sense. I don't know why, it just
does.

I wanted Bleachers to have a nostalgic element,
so some of the emotions almost do feel a little John
Hughes-y. But I didn't want it to be a retro album. It had
to be fully pushed into the future while grounded in that
moment that means so much to me. That’s why I brought in
the producer John Hill. He is very modern in everything he
does. He's always looking for new techniques and a way to
differentiate the work. Vince Clarke, from Depeche Mode,
Yaz, and Erasure, worked on a bunch of stuff as well and
added the grounding in the time period I was inspired by. I
mean, Vince literally made some of the albums that inspired
me to do Bleachers in the first place. It was really full
circle to have one of the people who inspire you to create
with you.

Lyrically, I'm writing about a lot of the
same things I wrote about with my previous band Steel Train,
one of them being my sister dying when I was 18, which
completely changed my entire existence. Right before that,
9/11 happened. Like most of us, it had a massive impact on
me. Then my cousin was killed in the Iraq war. All this at
once was a real end of innocence time period. I went through
so much in the aftermath of all that and developed a very
intense panic disorder. I had a really hard time for many
years before I started to find my way a bit more. But
obviously, it is a huge part of who I am. As a result, I
feel like the songs are generally about loss and finding a
way to pick up the pieces and move on without carrying too
many of them with you. But even though they can be really
dark, they always come around to something positive. Moments
where I think, "Fuck it all," aren’t what drive me to make
music. It's more like driving home at 2 a.m. and having a
breakthrough about how you're going to survive that makes it
into the music."

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